Problem

My main SSD is too small to hold all my kubernetes and K3s shenanigans. (It’s only about 512gb) So I need a way to move my K3s data folder out to my big HDD.

Solution

Caution

Before you do any of the following, make sure to stop the cluster with:
sudo systemctl stop k3s

K3s supports having a custom data directory, by letting me specify a data-dir.
I decided to specify it in the K3s config file at /etc/rancher/k3s/config.
If it isn’t there (as it wasn’t in my case), just create one. You’ll need to do this as the root user.
This is what I now have in there.

data-dir: /BIGHDD/rancher/k3s

And then, I …

  1. Created a rancher directory in my big hard disk. (root owns it)
  2. Ran rsync as the root user: rsync -a /var/lib/rancher/k3s/ /BIGHDD/rancher/k3s/
  3. Started up my cluster again with a sudo systemctl start k3s

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